Frack tracks, revisited
(Re: “Frack tracks,” cover story, July 19.) There is an elephant in the room. Show any photos of natural gas fields before and after and see the total devastation of the surface for decades to come.
Ask doctors in Garfield County about the effects of fracking chemicals on human health.
Jim Disinger/via Internet
Swooping is dangerous
I was a skydiving instructor at Mile-Hi Skydiving from the late ’90s to 2004. If you’re going to tell the story about “swooping” (“It’s not flying, it’s falling with style,” Adventure, July 19) you need to tell both sides of the story. More than 85 percent of skydivers that kill themselves in this sport do it while trying to “swoop,” and they all do it just to show off to the people on the ground.
Skydiving is a very safe sport; you’re in more danger of being killed while driving home after work today then jumping out of an airplane. But those who choose to risk their lives to show off, such as Nick Batsch, are a very poor example and give the sport a bad name. You, as well as your readers, need to understand this kid will eventually kill himself, or someone that thinks it’s cool will try it and die in the attempt. The function of a canopy is to get the skydiver from the bottom of a skydive to the ground safely!
Your encouragement of this aspect of what is a great sport, without printing the risk or death toll from swooping, is not appreciated by those of us who have seen good friends die attempting this unnecessary and deadly stunt!
I’m willing to bet you don’t have the balls to print this side of the effects of attempting this maneuver called “swooping”!
TJ McGinley/Longmont
Frack hack
The Danish Plan article “Fracking out of a recession” by Paul Danish in the July 12 issue of Boulder Weekly states: “Currently fracking in Colorado uses some 33,000 acre feet of water a year, less than 1 percent of the state’s water resources,” which, if I do the math correctly, means that we are losing permanently 1 percent of the state’s water per year — please correct me if I’ve misstated. Wouldn’t a 50 percent loss of total water by 2065 be a disaster for an increased Colorado population, or am I missing something here?
Additionally, Mr. Danish continues, “What’s more, drillers are increasingly reclaiming and recycling the water they use,” which seems to be “good news,” but I did a little “drilling” (yes, I meant that as a pun) for more information and found that the best efforts of the reclaiming and recycling is good only up to six times. In other words, sooner or later, the water used in fracking is unusable. Period.
Can Paul or any of his sources offer a better solution to this problem? I am not satisfied with this kind of easy, offthe-cuff coverage of what seems to be an essential question of collective survival. Are you?
Do you think the 10-year-old children today when they are 60 (in 50 years) will be?
Roger Carpenter/Loveland
Movie massacre
Since the Aurora shooting, there has been a widespread outpouring of emotion (from President Obama on down) saying that we, as a society, are “with the victims.” This isn’t true.
As individuals, we undoubtedly feel for the victims. But as a society, we support the right to own and use almost any kind of gun we can think of (including assault rifles and pump-action shotguns). So when a deranged person exercises that right, we make no attempt to restrict or curtail it.
We know there’s a price to pay for this right, since every so often we suffer a massacre — Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine. The sympathy we feel for the victims is therefore tempered by our knowledge — and acceptance — of the fact that someone has to pay. We’re genuinely sorry it was you, we say to the victims (as we hug our loved ones, glad that, this time, it wasn’t us), but your loss is not as important as our right to bear arms of almost any kind.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. We are a democratic legislating society. As long as we keep our current gun laws, we may, as individuals, be “with the victims.” But as a society, we prefer to support the rights of the shooters.
Richard Starks/Boulder
